ForbesOnTech

My Front Yard's Fruited Plains-- Peaches, Avocados and Apricots

Look carefully, and you'll see tiny brown/green dots. Those are the first avocados my five-year-old Pinkerton has produced.  it's going to be a long wait and many gallons of water unytil the finished three-pound druits mature late this year.  just up the hill from my pinkerton is a five-year-old Reed avocado also in first production. Thr Pinkerton avocado is probably the best tasting cultivar followed closely by the Reed and then the much more common Haas.

Lordy, lordy, my Avalon freestone has gone crazy this year. Shortly after i snapped this picture on June 7, i thinned about 50 green peaches, to make my tree produce larger, sweeter fruit. i suspect i'll have tgwo huge bins of ripe fruit in less than three weeks. Tomorrow morning i'm putting bird netting on my two peaches and my two apricot trees.

One of the hobbies i strongly recommend for stroke therapy is gardening. Like many people who have had a stroke and learned how to adjust to life, I'm often depressed, angry and frustrated, however, rather than simmer all day, i grab my gardening tools, a bag of steer manure and head out to my garden or the swelling fuit treeorchard in my one-acre front yard. i don't need to spend a long time in the garden or communing with my fruit trees to get centered again. And at sunset, i only have to walk out to my garden and look at the just turning red early beefsteak totoes, my lettuce and corn to feel really good about my life and to accept my changed life willingly.The stone fruits ripening in my front yard make me sit back and imagine the smell of a just cooked cobbler.  The deadline pressures of Silicon valley are mostly a faded memory now. And  to stay in the "now" i only have to walk 200 feet to either of my two gardens, or look down the hill to my fruit trees.--Jim Forbes 06/07/2009.

First '09 Trout Opener Reports-- Fuller Lake and East Fork San Gabriel Dam Confluence Both Recommended

I’m singin’ those “Sierra Trout Season Opening Day, Cause I’m stuck in San Diego Again” Blues this morning.

I hate when  my two best trout scouts call me long distance to tell me they caught quick limits by 10 AM, and are “going to nap.” It’s calls like this from members of the “Neener-Neener Brigade” that makes me want to take them  out albacore fishing and have a little game of “Pay Back” by innocently reaching over with my fishing pliers and accidentally cutting their line when they’re trying to land an albie in my boat.

I really wouldn’t do that, but I have thought about it.

But my buddies are pretty excited about the ‘09 trout season. The angler who turned me on to Fuller Lake, (which is about 10 miles east of Grass Valley, CA on Highway 20), reported he limited out in less than an hour, hooked a lot of trout but returned everything under 13-inches. John P. doesn’t lie about fish so I expect he has a stringer of big fat rainbows and one or two large spring brownies—which are most often caught at Fuller at the inflow of a small creek not far from the old Auburn Rod and Gun club building.

He told me that the best producing fly so far have been midges tied to #20 hooks and woolies on #14’s. I wish I were there right now, or,

Fishing the East Fork of the San Gabriel River at its sand and rock-rilled confluence with the San Gabriel Dam.

Occasional fly fishing partner Billy C (a highland Scot who lives in Arcadia CA) told me this morning that the rainbows are surging up from the San Gabriel Dam in what he assumes are “spring spawning runs.”

The East Fork is my natal fishing stream. I may pop up there next week for a couple of hours; since it’s unlikely I will be able to get up to the Sierra for at least two weeks.

You don’t need a lot of skill or expensive equipment to fish anywhere on the East Fork. My “outfit” consists of a pair of cut-offs, my good luck, but ripped savagely by my young cat, “Dan, “green, pink and yellow tie dye t-shirt and a pair or nasty old Converse athletic shoes. I fish the East Fork with a seven-foot limber rod, and a 6x tippet in front of a nymph tied to a #18 hook or midges on smaller hardware. I also carry a small selection of deerfly and other patterns, but most of my luck on the East Fork has always been with nymphs or midges.

Oh the horror: I’ve also been known to use bait at the confluence of the East Fork and the San Gabriel Dam. My best results have always been with Pautzkie’s premium salmon eggs on a laser sharpened egg hook attached to an unweighted line floated down stream. If the rainbows are there, they’re likely to hit a salmon egg when everything else fails and when they do, don’t be surprised when they go aerial or head down towards the dam.

And that’s this years first report on fishing at Fuller Lake and on the East Fork of the San Gabriel River at  it’s confluence with the San Gabriel Dam.  Happy Fishing!—Jim Forbes 04/25/2009.

ma Forbes' In-law Addition Makes it to CNN, iReports; "Aging in Place"

Ma Forbes and her new diggs here at  Rancho bizarro were featured today in an iReport piece on CNN called "Agig in Place." the segment was filmed by CNN San Diego stringer Chris Morrow, whose skill in producing, filming and editing a tightly crafted piece astounded me.

And with this, I'll close out my blog "subsection "Building  an Inlaw for Mom One Gigabyte at a Time."

Heres a link to the piece which ran  today: http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-238089.

One final note: Moving Ma Forbes down to my house was a very good thing. We laugh together, watch her and my potatoes grow together amnd marvel at the wild life that comes through my little mountain top here in  Escondido. The whole deal has worked out much better than I thought it would.--jim Forbes /04/02/2009.

Retirement; It's What You Make it-- Growing Vegetables, Fruits or Pretending You're a Big Old Otte, Anchored in the Kelp

This may be the prettiest Spring since I retired.  My rose garden fully blooming, my vegetable garden is in and set and all of my stone fruits have blossomed and are laden with tiny peaches and apricots.

How good is life when your most pressing problems are: a line of voles advancing abreast on your new avocado trees; or, your beloved peach tree has a slight case of residual peach leaf curl that’s proven resistant to dormant season treatment with a copper sulfide solution?

In retirement you don’t obsess about minor things, you work on them gradually. That’s part of the reason, My tack-drilling hyper accurate pellet rifle is out on my porch,  just in case  I see one or two voles pop up for afternoon sightings of their objectives—my three new Reed avocado trees down in the front yard. If they pop their furry little brown heads up, then one set of problems abruptly ends and their carcasses become hawk protein.

Life is tough on the down hill side of the food chain, but I really don’t want to waste $150 worth of prime orchard stock as burrowing rodent victuals.

Treating peach curl requires more faith and much greater patience. I’ll continue to spray my Avalon peach with throughout this season, paying close attention to its root ball and the lower 2/3’s of the tree. But this fall, I’m going to buy two new freestones, and make sure they’re resistant to peach leaf curl.

The best part of my life is my view of retirement and how I’ve used it pursue things that I’d only dreamed of in my first life.

Today,  I fish whenever the mood strikes or  feel there’s sufficient evidence that species people in my household prefer—halibut, yellowtail, tuna and much under fished perch are finning around down in San Diego Bay or off the La Jolla Coast kelp forests. I seldom stay out for much more than two or three hours at a time because I don’t like towing my boat through bumper to bumper traffic on the San Diego Freeway. And when I come home I’m sunburned, salt crusted and happy I’ve had another opportunity to be on the water.

Another great change in my life that’s happened in retirement is moving my aged mother out of the house she lived in for almost 60 years and into my home here in Escondido. Before MaForbes came down here, I made the 200-mile, round trip trek to my ancestral home sometimes twice a week. Today, the commute is  about 60 feet and we have dinne together most nights.

In retirement I’ve started to feel like I’ve finally “come home.” (a sensation I never experienced in the 30-plus years I liv0ed and worked in Silicon Valley).

Continuing education is also something that’s become important to me in my new life.  My one wish is that California state colleges offered junior and senior level distance learning-based classes in California history and its associated economic and sociological systems. They don’t, so about once every two or three months I go up to LA or the SF Bay Area to attend lectures that interest me.

Post retirement education is a hot topic among many of my friends from high school, college and military service.  Several buddies have planned their retirement based on proximity to universities or state colleges.

My continued interest in computer technologies is also a big part of my retirement as well. Because I’m now partially handicapped, I try to stay abreast of interface and user experience technologies and trends, which I occasionally use as the basis of blog material.

Computing in general has become a huge part of my retired life. A stroke several years ago left me unable to write legibly with my left hand (I am left-handed) so I use notebook computers everyday to do things others do with a pencil and paper. My anger over my condition has subsided at last because I’ve accepted not just where I am and but have become quite thankful to be above ground, able to still write, smile and fish by myself off the Southern California coast as the mood arises and the fish appear.

Today I sometimes find myself anchored on the edge of calm kelp beds, like an old contented otter, tanning in the sun and waiting for a tug on my fishing  line.—Jim Forbes 03/29/2008.

Initial Research Completed-- Time to Go California Dreaming

     

       I’ve spent the last six weeks looking at a long –held dream. My introspection has been brought on by simple things; my continued interest in mid-19^th Century California history and my desire to write about it through the eyes of the real and storytellers I’ll invent people who experienced it.

            For the last six months I’ve devoted a couple of hours a day to research. It’s been very enjoyable but I’ve reached a point where I nee to connect with the land north and east of S acramento where the events that interest me most occurred.

            I don’t want to retell the stories of wealth associated with the early successes of placer gold hunters, or to revisit the appalling life styles the Argonauts. I want to write about the myriad, but seldom told stories of entrepreneurl immigrants who understood a simple fact: supplying infrastructure needs would be more profitable over time than would searching out just one lucky gold strike.

            One of the many things I learned while producing Demo events reinforced my feelings about the historical facts of California infrastructure plays in an entrepreneurial society most often produce bankable results. In my contemporary research it’s very apparent that dry goods suppliers, freight haulers as well as those farmers who quickly converted from selling surplus-to-personal-needs produce to “market farming” ended up much richer than virtually any of the Argonauts.

    Recently I’ve lucked into a smattering of wholesale orders from some of the early dry goods suppliers in the gold districts as well as corresponding bills of lading. The net takeaway is simple: absent a commonly accepted monetary system, infrastructure-oriented entrepreneurs were literally sitting on much of California's gold.

    Now I’ve reached the point in my initial research where I have to lay my hands and senses on the experience. This means I want to go hide out in a cabin somewhere along the early winter Sierra snowline, read, outline, and do some rough writing. To really get a feeling for this I want to hike along frigid stream beds and follow old trails between Californiamicro gold districts and get a first-hand( ground level)feeling for the phenomena. Specifically: I think it’s important to understand why consumers would pay $30 in gold for a tin of sardines and a box of crackers, and to judge what it was like for a storekeep to stock enough goods to survive between incoming shipments.

    The most important part of the story of entrepreneurs may begin in Placerville. At one time in the mid 19^th Century thousands of draft animals trudged tons of supplies up what today is Route 50 to mining camps on the on Nevada’s Mount Davidson and in the California Sierra to the east. The scale of drayage operations along that route is staggering.  Feed and water for the teams had to be hauled to the trail head where commercial shipments were assembled and loaded.

     I’ve spent the last four weeks assembling notes, copies of old records and diaries and I’m about ready to go see the Elephant. And now that I absolutely know Santa is not going to be giving me a tiny furry highland heifer, I’m hoping he can help me reserve a cabin in the wilderness. I’ve got my quad outfitted with new tires, my sleeping bag readied and a small wind powered 12 volt generator (to keep my notebook charged) working. I’ll buy my grub in and a big supply of AA batteries for my LED lights ion Placerville. But most importantly, I’m still a Californio, with just a touch of silver in my auburn hair, ready to charge writing and researching into my 60^th year. Jim Forbes on 12/01/2008, the morning before I turn 60,writing from the little hill in Escondido that once belonged to California pioneer, Sam Brannan, editor and Publisher of the Alta Californian.